One of the sources of Plutarch’s biography of Mark Antony, written 150 years after Antony’s death and full of some of the most lurid anecdotes of his life of luxury, was a descendant of a man who worked in Cleopatra’s kitchens – and may well have preserved a view of the culinary style of her court from below stairs. But it is absolutely clear that, both at the time and even more so in retrospect, Augustus (as he was soon known) exploited the idea of a clash between his own deep-rooted, Roman, Western traditions and the ‘oriental’ excess that Antony and Cleopatra represented. In the war of
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